How Conversation to Completion moves contact centers past containment

Contact centers have traditionally measured success by containment, which refers to the number of calls that never reached a human agent. However, this metric is becoming less relevant as it fails to capture whether a customer's issue was actually resolved. Zoom Communications Inc.'s Ram Rajagopalan, head of product, AI for Zoom CX, has been working to incorporate the concept of conversation to completion into the company's virtual agent platform.

This approach focuses on whether an interaction truly addressed the customer's concerns, rather than merely avoiding a live agent. Rajagopalan emphasized that while containment rates were the primary focus for many customers just a year or 18 months ago, the industry is now moving towards end-to-end resolution. During a broadcast on theCUBE, Rajagopalan and Joe Rittenhouse, co-CEO of Converged Technology Professionals Inc., discussed how enterprises should move AI pilots into production.

Rittenhouse stressed the importance of starting with a practical use case instead of an ambitious one, suggesting that enterprises should focus on simple questions that arise after hours when customer support teams are less staffed. He also highlighted that many of the clients his firm works with have an AI committee in place, while others are still determining the best approach for implementing AI strategies.

Zoom has been navigating its own internal governance challenges as it scales its AI Companion across thousands of customer seats. Rajagopalan stressed the need to transfer full context between virtual and human agents to ensure efficient resolution of customer issues without the need for repetition or searching for information.